Advances in audio and video (multimedia) compression technology over the last 20 years have made the transmission of high quality audio and video streams viable over low bandwidth networks. At the same time, the world's fixed and mobile communications networks have been upgraded to provide greater bandwidth. These networks are commonly referred to as broadband networks. Combining advanced multimedia compression with broadband networks allow providers to deliver high resolution audio and video to a wide variety of devices (personal computers, mobile phones etc).
With the recent availability of broadband networks, demand for multimedia content by subscribers has been rapidly increasing. More and more multimedia service providers are now offering multimedia content that can be streamed to a mobile device. The content may include both real-time content, such as a live sporting event, and non real-time content, such as a pre-recorded television program. Quite often, where the content is not available locally, service providers source the content from remote content providers, via a network such as the Internet. However, streaming content from a single service provider can be unsatisfactory due to the Internet's inherent unreliability (low availability). Any outage results in user dissatisfaction, which can potentially cost the service provider large sums of money, as well as negative publicity.